Telekinetic Monkey

[Tufelhunden]

Rumor has it that there is a telekinetic monkey in the bowels of Duke University's laboratories. It is a small owl monkey approximately eight pounds. What researchers did first was try and entice the monkey to interact with a computer. They accomplished this by having the monkey try and move a cursor on a computer screen towards a blinking target on the same screen. Upon accomplishment of this task, the monkey would be rewarded with a specified amount of juice. What they later fund was that they didn't even have to entice the monkey, for it was hooked on the video game! The next task was to implant an aspirin-sized chip into the part of the brain of the monkey which initiates motor movement (I'm not sure what the technical term is, but I think it is the part called the "motor cortex" or it is the part right above the insertion of the cord into the cerebellum) This implant had hundreds of extremely fine wires emanating from it which were then specifically attached to different neurons within the monkey's skull, so as to monitor the monkey's motor initiations when it was playing the video game with the joystick. What the scientists then did was send the signals generated by the implant to a robotic arm in the laboratories of MIT and found that the robotic arm would initiate the EXACT same movements as the monkey's appendages back at Duke. I know it isn't "technically" telekinetic, but maybe they can call this some sort of "cerebrotelemotorkinesis"?

There is no source for this for me to quote as I overheard it on "Coasttocoast" with Art Bell on the radio last night on the way home.

[dan_nc]

http://www.dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=69


DURHAM, N.C. - Duke University Medical Center researchers and their colleagues have tested a neural system on monkeys that enabled the animals to use their brain signals, as detected by implanted electrodes, to control a robot arm to reach for a piece of food. The scientists even transmitted the brain signals over the Internet, remotely controlling a robot arm 600 miles away.
According to the scientists, their recording and analysis system, in which the electrodes remained implanted for two years in one animal, could form the basis for a brain-machine interface that would allow paralyzed patients to control the movement of prosthetic limbs. Their finding also supports new thinking about how the brain encodes information, by spreading it across large populations of neurons and by rapidly adapting to new circumstances.
In an article in the Nov. 16, 2000, Nature, Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of neurobiology, and his colleagues described how they tested their system on two owl monkeys - implanting arrays of as many as 96 electrodes, each less than the diameter of a human hair, into the monkeys' brains.
The technique they used, called "multi-neuron population recordings" was developed by co-author John Chapin and Nicolelis. It allows large numbers of single neurons to be recorded separately, and then combines their information using a computer coding algorithm.
The scientists implanted the electrodes in multiple regions of the brain's cortex, including the motor cortex from which movement is controlled. The scientists then recorded the output of these electrodes as the animals learned reaching tasks, including reaching for small pieces of food.
The scientists fed the mass of neural signal data generated during many repetitions of these tasks into a computer, which analyzed the brain signals to determine whether it was possible to predict the trajectory of the monkey's hand from the signals. In this analysis, the scientists used simple mathematical methods to predict hand trajectories in real-time as the monkeys learned to make different types of hand movements.



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[Tufelhunden]

Nice, I didn't even know this was old news, as I heard it last night.

[Tufelhunden]

It would be nice to think that this would be used to help us SCIs, but my gut tells me this will be applied by the DOD into an air-defense system.